Joan Rivers
Comedian
Being poor—or, worse, having Kelsey Grammer fight with Teddy Kennedy over who is to drive me home.
What is your greatest fear?
Question
What is your idea of perfect happiness?
Identity & self
Question
How would you like to die?
Death & what remains
Question
What is the trait you most deplore in others?
Values & belief
Question
What do you value most in your friends?
Relationships
Originally asked
Vanity Fair, to its interview subject, The Proust Questionnaire
The exact prompt is fixed in Vanity Fair's Proust Questionnaire and independently sustained in The Guardian's The Q&A over multiple decades.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
Living with severe chronic pain, or forgetting the name of the person I’m interviewing.
Vanity Fair, The Proust Questionnaire, Vanity Fair, September 2012 source ↗
Others on this question
View all 266 →When I was little, a couple of rapes took place in Glasgow. I remember my mum saying to walk in the middle of the pavement, and to this day I am very conscious of where I am.
Leon Panetta
Attorney and politician; Director of the Office of Management and Budget, White House Chief of Staff, Director of the CIA and Secretary of Defense
The greatest fear I always had in the jobs I was in was that some son of a bitch I never knew or met was going to screw up, and I was going to get blamed for it. [laughs]
Recorded
William J. Antholis, Presidential Oral Histories, Miller Center, 30 September 2021
source ↗
Incapacitation.
More from Terry Gross
View profile →A glass of wine, a good dinner with my husband, and a day ahead of me without a deadline is close enough.
Swiftly, painlessly, and old.
The inability to stop talking about themselves when they’re not being interviewed.
Their willingness to put up with my endless explanations about why I can’t see them because I’m under deadline.
More on identity & self
- Which trait do you most dislike in yourself? 252 answers
- What did you want to be when you were growing up? 204 answers
- What most recently made you cry? 193 answers
- What is your idea of perfect happiness? 161 answers
- How would you describe yourself in three words? 114 answers
- What are you most proud of? 109 answers
Also answered this
Judy Blume, Andrea Bocelli, Eugene Levy, Robert De Niro, Niamh Cusack, Robert Carlyle
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Explore further
- All identity & self questions
- The The Proust Questionnaire questionnaire — 5 questions from the same format
- Explore the archive — by field, age, era, and subject